Free Colonel Brandon's Diary by Amanda Grange Page A

money. If he finds an heiress who will have him, I feel sure he will take another wife.
    I put my head in my hands. All that hope and beauty coming to nothing. She was divorced, disgraced, cast off, and by my brother, a fiend who should never have been allowed to marry her. I felt ill, even worse than I had felt when hearing of her marriage. At least then I had been able to hope she would not be too unhappy. But now I could hope for nothing.
    I read on, feeling worse and worse with every word, for she had been abandoned by her first seducer. Without an adequate allowance, for my brother had been mean and vengeful and had not given her an income that was either adequate to her fortune or sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, she had sunk still further, finding another protector and sinking yet again.
    I folded the letter at last and willed myself to turn to stone, for if I remained a creature of flesh and blood, I feared the pain would kill me.

1782

    Monday 9 December
    How strange it feels to be in England again after almost four years away. I had forgotten how low the sky was, and how grey, and how it leached the colour from everything, leaving the world a dreary place.
    As I stepped ashore, I fastened the buttons of my greatcoat and hunched my shoulders against the rain. My countrymen hurried past with their colourless faces, dreary and sad, and I felt a stab of homesickness for the Indies, for sunburnt skin and bright colours and the heat of the sun, but then I shook it away. It was not England that had called me home again, it was Eliza.
    I thanked God that I was at last able to take some leave so that I could do what I had longed to do ever since I had learnt of her sorrows. Return to England and find her. Care for her. Comfort her. And, perhaps, make her happy.
     
     
    Wednesday 11 December
    I set out early this morning, walking to the inn where I would catch the stage for home.
    Home! Delaford is no longer my home. It ceased to be my home the day I was cast out, the day my father irrevocably set Eliza and me on a path to misery.
    The coach arrived, and amidst the general bustle, I climbed aboard. The gaiety of the other passengers could not touch me. I was lost in my memories, and in my distaste for what was to come, for having learnt that my sister no longer knew of Eliza’s whereabouts, I knew that, in order to find her, I had to see my brother.
     
     
    Thursday 12 December
    As the coach approached Delaford, to my surprise I was thrown back in time to the day I returned from Oxford as a young man, full of hope and optimism. I remembered it clearly, and not only remembered it, felt it, with the same sensations assailing me.
    When the carriage came to the bend where, all those years ago, I had seen Eliza walking through the fields, and when I remembered my elation as I had leapt from the carriage and rolled down the hill to meet her; when I recalled the love that had coursed through me as I had picked her up and swung her round, then I was nearly unmanned.
    How could it have happened? How could such love and happiness have led to such misery and despair?
    My hands clenched themselves into balls, and I began to wish I had not come.
    The coach rolled on, past the scene of such happiness, and continued along the road. Before long it was pulling into the inn yard. There were the usual cries of the ostlers as they changed the horses. The door was opened and the steps pulled up. I waited whilst a well-dressed woman and her daughter climbed out and then I followed them, looking about me.
    The inn was very much the same, with its half timbering and its freshly painted sign, and the yard, though larger, was still clean and well run. I had no difficulty in hiring a horse to take me on, and I was gratified that Bill Sanders, who still worked at the inn, remembered me.
    ‘If it isn’t Master James!’ he said, his face creasing in deep lines — his only appearance of age — as I asked him for a horse. ‘You’re